Foods rich in fish oils such as omega-3 dont reduce heart-disease risk, calling into question national dietary guidelines that promote the fats as beneficial to cardiovascular health, an analysis of 72 studies found.

The research showed insufficient support for nutritional recommendations by groups such as the American Heart Association that advocate high consumption of polyunsaturated fats like omega-3, found in fish such as salmon, and omega-6, found in corn and sunflower oils, as well as some nuts and seeds. The study appeared in Mondays Annals of Internal Medicine.

Here we go again. A few months ago a similar study concluded only fish oil/omega 3 supplements were useless. This one goes further and says omega 3 from eating fish is useless, also. The study also concludes saturated fats pose no additional health risk for heart disease.

An ongoing pattern. Identify supplements that have a proven value in promoting health, offer a flimsy "study" that claims the supplement has no value. Building up a collection of flim flam "research" that will be used by an easily corrupted politician to craft legislation banning supplements...because the government always knows best.

Agenda 21 and “Here’s Johnny” Mc Cain is at the forefront of trying to implement “Codex Alimentarius” whereby all of our supplements are taken away and we are forced to eat GMO/glyphosate filled food from Monsanto, Syngenta and Bayer.
Please take the blue pill and die quickly.
Thank you.

An ongoing pattern. Identify supplements that have a proven value in promoting health, offer a flimsy “study” that claims the supplement has no value. Building up a collection of flim flam “research” that will be used by an easily corrupted politician to craft legislation banning supplements...because the government always knows best.

Yup. Big Pharma doesn’t want any competition, so now they are targeting the health benefits of foods themselves, not just supplements. I don’t take fish oil supplements, but I do eat three 3.75 oz cans of sardines in olive oil a week. I already have heart disease so it won’t protect me from that, but they still have other health benefits.

OMG! In the paranoia that my heart is going to fail like a car engine without oil, I have been a fish oil fanatic. I take fish oil morning day and night. My house smells of fish oil and my cat follows me around meowing. There is a oily film over all my door nobs and my wife is cooking me fish twice a week. Now that I know the truth, I am freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Good God Almighty, I am freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! (sound of yippee skippee).

10
posted on 03/23/2014 10:55:16 PM PDT
by jonrick46
(The opium of Communists: other people's money.)

Avocado oil can do the trick also. It has omegas in it. Use it as a moisturizer.

Now about this study. I think they’re correct. If those fish and nuts come from China, then yes, it won’t decrease heart disease.

I used to give my dog sardines. His coat was beautiful. Then for some reason I stopped till I noticed his coat was yuckie. I started giving him the sardines but his coat did not improve. I thought he was ill or something. Then I looked closely at the tin of sardines. Horrors!!! imported from China. I changed brands and my dog’s coat improved. I hope my dog forgives me for buying “cheap” sardines.

A while ago I posted this article and I do believe it is worth reading. Make your own case ..

Heart Surgeon Speaks Out On What Really Causes Heart Disease (Be careful if you happen to have a sweet tooth and stay away from pre-fab foods)

Dr. Dwight Lundell

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 21:58 CST

We physicians with all our training, knowledge and authority often acquire a rather large ego that tends to make it difficult to admit we are wrong. So, here it is. I freely admit to being wrong. As a heart surgeon with 25 years experience, having performed over 5,000 open-heart surgeries, today is my day to right the wrong with medical and scientific fact. I trained for many years with other prominent physicians labelled “opinion makers.” Bombarded with scientific literature, continually attending education seminars, we opinion makers insisted heart disease resulted from the simple fact of elevated blood cholesterol.

The only accepted therapy was prescribing medications to lower cholesterol and a diet that severely restricted fat intake. The latter of course we insisted would lower cholesterol and heart disease. Deviations from these recommendations were considered heresy and could quite possibly result in malpractice.

It Is Not Working!

These recommendations are no longer scientifically or morally defensible. The discovery a few years ago that inflammation in the artery wall is the real cause of heart disease is slowly leading to a paradigm shift in how heart disease and other chronic ailments will be treated. The long-established dietary recommendations have created epidemics of obesity and diabetes, the consequences of which dwarf any historical plague in terms of mortality, human suffering and dire economic consequences.

Despite the fact that 25% of the population takes expensive statin medications and despite the fact we have reduced the fat content of our diets, more Americans will die this year of heart disease than ever before. Statistics from the American Heart Association show that 75 million Americans currently suffer from heart disease, 20 million have diabetes and 57 million have pre-diabetes. These disorders are affecting younger and younger people in greater numbers every year.

Simply stated, without inflammation being present in the body, there is no way that cholesterol would accumulate in the wall of the blood vessel and cause heart disease and strokes. Without inflammation, cholesterol would move freely throughout the body as nature intended. It is inflammation that causes cholesterol to become trapped.

Inflammation is not complicated — it is quite simply your body’s natural defense to a foreign invader such as a bacteria, toxin or virus. The cycle of inflammation is perfect in how it protects your body from these bacterial and viral invaders. However, if we chronically expose the body to injury by toxins or foods the human body was never designed to process, a condition occurs called chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is just as harmful as acute inflammation is beneficial.

What thoughtful person would willfully expose himself repeatedly to foods or other substances that are known to cause injury to the body? Well, smokers perhaps, but at least they made that choice willfully.
The rest of us have simply followed the recommended mainstream diet that is low in fat and high in polyunsaturated fats and carbohydrates, not knowing we were causing repeated injury to our blood vessels. This repeated injury creates chronic inflammation leading to heart disease, stroke, diabetes and obesity.

Let me repeat that: The injury and inflammation in our blood vessels is caused by the low fat diet recommended for years by mainstream medicine. What are the biggest culprits of chronic inflammation? Quite simply, they are the overload of simple, highly processed carbohydrates (sugar, flour and all the products made from them) and the excess consumption of omega-6 vegetable oils like soybean, corn and sunflower that are found in many processed foods.

Take a moment to visualize rubbing a stiff brush repeatedly over soft skin until it becomes quite red and nearly bleeding. you kept this up several times a day, every day for five years. If you could tolerate this painful brushing, you would have a bleeding, swollen infected area that became worse with each repeated injury. This is a good way to visualize the inflammatory process that could be going on in your body right now.

Regardless of where the inflammatory process occurs, externally or internally, it is the same. I have peered inside thousands upon thousands of arteries. A diseased artery looks as if someone took a brush and scrubbed repeatedly against its wall. Several times a day, every day, the foods we eat create small injuries compounding into more injuries, causing the body to respond continuously and appropriately with inflammation. While we savor the tantalizing taste of a sweet roll, our bodies respond alarmingly as if a foreign invader arrived declaring war. Foods loaded with sugars and simple carbohydrates, or processed with omega-6 oils for long shelf life have been the mainstay of the American diet for six decades. These foods have been slowly poisoning everyone.

How does eating a simple sweet roll create a cascade of inflammation to make you sick?

Imagine spilling syrup on your keyboard and you have a visual of what occurs inside the cell. When we consume simple carbohydrates such as sugar, blood sugar rises rapidly. In response, your pancreas secretes insulin whose primary purpose is to drive sugar into each cell where it is stored for energy. If the cell is full and does not need glucose, it is rejected to avoid extra sugar gumming up the works.

When your full cells reject the extra glucose, blood sugar rises producing more insulin and the glucose converts to stored fat. What does all this have to do with inflammation? Blood sugar is controlled in a very narrow range. Extra sugar molecules attach to a variety of proteins that in turn injure the blood vessel wall. This repeated injury to the blood vessel wall sets off inflammation. When you spike your blood sugar level several times a day, every day, it is exactly like taking sandpaper to the inside of your delicate blood vessels.

While you may not be able to see it, rest assured it is there. I saw it in over 5,000 surgical patients spanning 25 years who all shared one common denominator — inflammation in their arteries.

Let’s get back to the sweet roll. That innocent looking goody not only contains sugars, it is baked in one of many omega-6 oils such as soybean. Chips and fries are soaked in soybean oil; processed foods are manufactured with omega-6 oils for longer shelf life. While omega-6’s are essential -they are part of every cell membrane controlling what goes in and out of the cell — they must be in the correct balance with omega-3’s.

If the balance shifts by consuming excessive omega-6, the cell membrane produces chemicals called cytokines that directly cause inflammation.

Today’s mainstream American diet has produced an extreme imbalance of these two fats. The ratio of imbalance ranges from 15:1 to as high as 30:1 in favor of omega-6. That’s a tremendous amount of cytokines causing inflammation. In today’s food environment, a 3:1 ratio would be optimal and healthy.

To make matters worse, the excess weight you are carrying from eating these foods creates overloaded fat cells that pour out large quantities of pro-inflammatory chemicals that add to the injury caused by having high blood sugar. The process that began with a sweet roll turns into a vicious cycle over time that creates heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and finally, Alzheimer’s disease, as the inflammatory process continues unabated.

There is no escaping the fact that the more we consume prepared and processed foods, the more we trip the inflammation switch little by little each day. The human body cannot process, nor was it designed to consume, foods packed with sugars and soaked in omega-6 oils.

There is but one answer to quieting inflammation, and that is returning to foods closer to their natural state. To build muscle, eat more protein. Choose carbohydrates that are very complex such as colorful fruits and vegetables. Cut down on or eliminate inflammation causing omega-6 fats like corn and soybean oil and the processed foods that are made from them, including sugar.

One tablespoon of corn oil contains 7,280 mg of omega-6; soybean contains 6,940 mg. Instead, use olive oil or butter from grass-fed beef. Animal fats contain less than 20% omega-6 and are much less likely to cause inflammation than the supposedly healthy oils labeled polyunsaturated. Forget the “science” that has been drummed into your head for decades. The science that saturated fat alone causes heart disease is non-existent. The science that saturated fat raises blood cholesterol is also very weak. Since we now know that cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease, the concern about saturated fat is even more absurd today.

The cholesterol theory led to the no-fat, low-fat recommendations that in turn created the very foods now causing an epidemic of inflammation. Mainstream medicine made a terrible mistake when it advised people to avoid saturated fat in favor of foods high in omega-6 fats. We now have an epidemic of arterial inflammation leading to heart disease and other silent killers.

What you can do is choose whole foods your grandmother served and not those your mom turned to as grocery store aisles filled with manufactured foods. By eliminating inflammatory foods and adding essential nutrients from fresh unprocessed food, you will reverse years of damage in your arteries and throughout your body from consuming the typical American diet

Reader Comments Damage Control Freaks By: bluenorther I hope that within twenty years, coronary bypass surgery will be as discredited as pre-frontal lobotomies.

This article follows exactly what Gary Taubes has written in “Why We Get Fat”.

I had a six-tuple bypass operation to save my useless life, two years ago. It was the worst experience anyone could endure; I would never inflict it on anyone I care about. From what I’ve read, I seem to have got off easy compared to other people’s experiences!

The doctors can’t honestly tell us how bad it will be, because we’d all opt out.

What infuriates me is the total lack of effort made by my doctors to investigate WHY I ended up on their operating table. All of my friends and family are mystified, asking how this happened. In fact, I would have died in a few more days. I don’t smoke, I’m not overweight, and I exercise enough to kill most ordinary people.

All the doctors have done is prescribe meds that don’t work, and then get angry when I won’t take them. I haven’t seen a single blood test result that might give me a clue

Just a thought!
Inflammation is one of the defensive mechanisms of the human body. Matter of fact I have run across the same analysis from different sources, not just as described as here by Dr. Lundell. Once such inflammation occurs such as in artery walls etc. also as described in this article, the human body takes cholesterol from where ever it can find it and transports to the site of the inflammation to initiate the repair job and then keeps piling it on until at one point the artery gets choked off completely and some one ends up with a heart attack.

Doesn’t it make more sense to figure out in the first place what is the cause of such inflammation instead of attempting to fix it once it has taken place and may become chronic? Well I am not a doctor by any means, I am just attempting to utilize common sense and try to apply it to the problem at hand.

Speaking for myself, I never had much of a sweet tooth to begin with and in latter years been staying away from it altogether, matter of fact I don’t even have any regular sugar at home and for what ever I use a little sweetener for, I only use XYLITOL, you can find an analysis of it by Googling it.

I do not use much fats or oils and what ever I use is virgin olive oil. Along with it very little bread, and hardly any pasta etc. or products created with flower. Primarily I stick with fruits, vegetables, oatmeal, flax seeds, some yogurt, unprocessed long grain rice, some fish or a little chicken and very little red meat.

As mentioned earlier I have been taking Aspirin for good many year, matter of fact since I was a teen, in varying doses and quantities for problems with my spinal column or problems associated with my joints what appears to be more of a mechanical problem than anything else. From what I have gathered over the years related to Aspirin and what seems to be backed up by medical doctors who have done some serious study regarding Aspirin is that it will subdue inflammation where ever it may find it, and most problems start with some inflammation either here or there.

I only take coated Aspirin which is less likely to cause any stomach problems related to possible bleeding, and yes I am very well aware that it is also a blood thinning agent and in turn causes the platelets of the blood to become less sticky. In other words it prevents them from sticking together and pile up and cause any problem or possible blockage. It is relatively cheap and drug companies can not make a great deal of money from it since it can not be patented and over all it is one of the least damaging pain killers around as it will sub due the inflammation which in turn causes most pains we generally experience.

Instead drug companies as well as most doctors, not that I have anything against them and do appreciate them, will push fancy synthesized expensive drugs, over suggesting a much more healthy life style as well as recommending Aspirin to counteract inflammation where ever it may flare up , including the interior of our arteries.

Just like red rice yeast helps lower cholesterol, but they rather you buy the $190 per month lipitor prescription. Actually, though Lipitor was scheduled to go generic, so I don’t know if it is generic now, I know it’s been getting yearly waivers on going generic for a couple of years.

My first set of 3 months prescriptions for the year was a huge bill.

And Right source pharmacy (Humana) sucks cause I can’t establish an account ... keeps saying my group ID isn’t valid. But they keep calling me, there was a time I was getting 7-8 phone calls a week from humana.

21
posted on 03/24/2014 2:43:47 AM PDT
by Usagi_yo
(Journalticion -- journalist + politician. Used to be called propagandist.)

I keep my cholesterol and triglycerides down below maximums by eating oatmeal frequently. And that is the quickie instant stuff. It works great, for me anyway. I eat fish once a week on Fridays, and that is enough seafood for me.

22
posted on 03/24/2014 2:57:17 AM PDT
by HerrBlucher
(Praise to the Lord the Almighty the King of Creation)

“Instead drug companies as well as most doctors, not that I have anything against them and do appreciate them, will push fancy synthesized expensive drugs, over suggesting a much more healthy life style as well as recommending Aspirin to counteract inflammation where ever it may flare up , including the interior of our arteries.”

They aren’t mutually exclusive, and any physician who purports to treat coronary disease and who doesn’t recommend daily aspirin and a healthy lifestyle is just not following national recommendations.

All these so-called “studies” do is give people with nothing better to do, something to do.

Once they have stated their “scientific” opinion, they can sit around, debate and defend against the rights and wrongs of their opposition, hence giving them more of nothing constructive to do. The only scientific things we know is that "you will eat a peck of dirt before you die" :)

“Thank you for mentioning that fish oil reduces triglycerides. I need to get back to taking it, then”

I doubt OTC grade does much, but prescription Vascepa (highly purified fish oil)significantly reduces trigs and Bad Cholesterol. It’s best in it’s class but the FDA has only approved it for trigs over 500, although Docs can prescribe off label for lower levels.

I do not use much fats or oils and what ever I use is virgin olive oil. Along with it very little bread, and hardly any pasta etc. or products created with flower. Primarily I stick with fruits, vegetables, oatmeal, flax seeds, some yogurt, unprocessed long grain rice, some fish or a little chicken and very little red meat.

What you have described here is the Mediterranean Diet. If I do eat bread or pasta, I use whole grain.

Wow, this doctor’s point of view is very similar to David Perlmutter, MD. His recent book The Grain Brain makes an impassioned case for removing gluten, sugar, and most carbohydrates from our diet. It has provoked a great deal of criticism from the orthodox medical and nutritional folks. It’s hard to believe things that run counter to the “conventional wisdom” we’ve been hearing all our lives. For me, the proof was in the dramatic improvement in the way I function and feel after losing almost 60 lbs. in the last year on a strictly limited carbohydrate diet. By its very nature, it removed much of the gluten from my diet. Both my wife and I have virtually eliminated refined sugar from our diets, too. Exercise is also a necessary component. Here again orthodox advice can lead you astray and cause harm—resistance training should predominate, and long stretches of cardio on machines like treadmills should be avoided. I did NOT get my MD’s approval; he would have tried to dissuade me. I went ahead and did it, and let the scale and improved blood work numbers do the talking.

Color me cautious but, being followed with annual vascular CT scans for a ballooning aorta they found a kidney artery 80% blocked. My daughter a nurse suggested I take krill oil. The next year showed it 60% blocked and the subsequent years showed the artery free of obstruction. So, I don’t know if the krill did it, but I keep taking it.

I know the feeling. A month ago my doctor wrote a prescription for Vitamin D2 because blood test showed D level was seriously low. When I went to pick it up at the pharmacy I noticed that it was a "synthetic" product, and I have always heard bad things about synthetic vitamins. So I rejected it and went to the Health Food store and bought a Vitamin D3 all natural supplement - strength of which is the same as that prescribed by my doctor.

The doctor is very angry at me and says if I refuse to follow instructions how can she help me. When I explained that I substituted a natural (non-synthetic) product she said she had never heard there was any problems with synthetic vitamins.

To say the least, I am having trouble knowing who to believe and trust. Any FReeper advice is welcomed.

I eat sardines, too, but mine are in either Louisiana hot sauce or mustard. I cannot remember for the life of me the type of oil that they normally come in but olive oil does not strike a bell. Is that the usual oil you see in sardines? I'm not a big fan of oily sardines but would have them if the oil--such as olive--is more beneficial. Thanks.

33
posted on 03/24/2014 6:22:03 AM PDT
by OldPossum
("It's" is the contraction of "it" and "is"; think about ITS implications.)

By the way, I never see seventy again. Been very active all my life and have been exercising regularly, even more so in my later years. I swim one mile a day and six miles per week and push weights afterwards. I hardly ever ate fast food, and in later years avoided it altogether. Do not drink any pop, hardly any bread or products made from flower, no cookies, cakes, ice cream etc. But as strange as it may sound I love cod live oil and regular butter along with olive oil. For breakfast I always have an egg, sunny side up floating in olive oil, yum, yum.

Due to the aging process I had gained some weight as my metabolism slowed down considerably and I knew this could not continue. Even so I ate mostly the right foods I still was gaining, so I cut back and lost about thirty pounds over about a year and now I am back to just about the weight I weighed when I was twenty. After checking my last blood test the doctor told me that it is very seldom he seen such good results. Along with the proper diet I am also heavy on certain types of vitamins, contrary that many doctors think they are useless, which is a bunch of crap. So, all considered, I plan on continuing what I have been doing as I would stand too much to lose doing otherwise.

Yep...what you said...Low carb works for me as well as intervals for 20 min. 2-3 times weekly, Pilates and weights. Recently added high fat...As really the research is showing humans NEED FAT more than anything...just NOT fake fats.

I eat sardines, too, but mine are in either Louisiana hot sauce or mustard. I cannot remember for the life of me the type of oil that they normally come in but olive oil does not strike a bell. Is that the usual oil you see in sardines? I’m not a big fan of oily sardines but would have them if the oil—such as olive—is more beneficial. Thanks.

I eat King Oscar. I haven’t checked any other brands to see what they come in. Olive oil (extra virgin) is VERY healthy.

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